Holy sidequests Batman! What should have been a fun short 5-8 hour romp was stretched to more than double that with seemingly endless fetch quests. And these aren't entirely optional either, they are how upgrades to your equipment are unlocked, so whether you want to or not, you will be running around doing menial tasks for people.

Now for the good. I liked the characters. CJ, Garoo and Isha have a fun dynamic both as characters, and in combat as classic rogue, tank, mage archetypes, though the tank role felt weak compared to the other two.

This game feels like a good intro to the world of Eiyuden Chronicles and makes me excited to see these characters again in the full game. I wish I could say I liked the game more, but what is there was adequate.

This game is a delight to play and takes you on an emotional journey. The story follows a puppy who gains the power of a magic paintbrush as all color is drained from the world. As the new wielder, you are tasked with fighting the corruption and bringing back color to the world.

Outside of the boss battles, there is no combat, the gameplay is entirely traversal and puzzle based using your ever growing paintbrush powers.

One of my favorite aspects of this game are the NPCs, who are varied and have their own developing stories as the game progress if you bother talking to them or doing their quests. You will regularly see familiar faces as you travel the map, as they like to move too which makes the world feel more alive as you are not the only one experiencing it.

I don't know why I expected a better game. Dragon Quest is known by many as the first jrpg. It is the standard that so many great games were built upon. And built is correct, for what is here is so barebones it is barely enjoyable.

You leave town, fight monsters, level up, get money, buy new equipment, move on. That's pretty much the whole game. And combat is mostly just hitting attack against the one monster on screen. There aren't enough options to have much in the way of strategy.

Play it for the history if you want, but there is nothing of substance here. This game could not be simpler and the formula has been greatly improved since.

What if Mario Party was an RPG instead of minigames and it hated you. I don't say that lightly, Dokapon Kingdom hates you, the player, and will take every chance it has to ruin your day. Too much money? one bad roll and you now have negative money. Too many towns? Given away to the other players. Got a really nice weapon? Broken immediately.

Sounds frustrating, right? But I gave it 4 stars anyway, because you have to embrace the madness. I played with a group of 3 others and watching the game ruin all of our lives collectively was a good time.

This game feels like a Silent Hill story wrapped in Resident Evil gameplay. Even as I finished it, I'm still not sure what is going on, but that seems to be by design.

The gameplay is a survival horror that has you wandering multiple maps and solving puzzles while fighting or avoiding the numerous enemies wandering about. The limited ammo and enemies that will just come back to life on their own eventually unless you use a very rare consumable leads to a lot of increased tension.

As you explore you will have to decide on when you fight, when you sneak by and when you run, which adds a lot to the survival aspect to it.

The game is fairly short, but for this kind of gameplay and story, I feel any longer would have started to drag more. It's gameplay is simple and the story is confusing, but I overall, enjoyed my time with it.

I appreciate how different this game is. It tries an interesting setting with fairly unique gameplay. It has some hits, it has some misses, but is overall a unique package that's worth trying out.

The story follows a land of winged people as they struggle to stop an evil empire from reviving a dead god to destroy the world. It takes some twists and turns along the way but is overall a fairly standard scrappy band saves the world story.

Now the gameplay is where this game shines. The card combat system feels unique as its not just a deck builder, but also tasks you with creating poker hands out of the numbers on your weapon/armor cards for extra bonuses while also holding you to a strict time limit to prevent the combat from taking forever while you pick the ideal card combo. Late game is when this system shines as these bonuses become the majority of your damage and you watch the numbers climb ever higher.

Some downsides to this game however are the card aging system that sees all of your healing food items rot after a set amount of time as well as your consumable key items being that both age and expire the same way and must be refreshed for side quests.

For example, a sidequest asks you for yogurt. You can pick up milk at one location and wait for it to age into yogurt, but you must be quick, because it will then age again into cheese before too long. Managing these consumable key items are a pain the entire game as it makes makes clear what is valuable and worth keeping and what is garbage you should throw away to make space for other items from your limited slots.

The lack of backtracking also makes it frustrating to do sidequests across multiple islands as you wont know when you'll be allowed back and by then your items will have aged into something else you can't use.

A lot of the most annoying parts of this game are optional, so it really is up to you how frustrating a time you have with this game or if you choose to ignore all of that and just enjoy the main story and gameplay for what it is.

The game was fun like the classic TMNT arcade games, but way too short. I really expected a lot more out of it. It was fun for what it was and if you liked the old arcade games, you'll like this. Just don't expect it to last.

Story was practically nonexistent, gameplay was simple, but enjoyable. The controls for throwing enemies took a little getting used to, but worked well once you got the hang of it. Aerial enemies can be annoying to take down and the challenges reused "don't get injured" way too often, if they are going to limit it to 3 challenges per level, some variety would have been nice..

Slay the Princess is a highly imaginative, narrative, choice based, horror visual novel. The voice acting from all the characters is excellent, specially as they react in all sorts of ways to your choices and its always a delight in how its done. The pencil art style is beautiful and imaginative with just the right amount of animation to capture scenes of horror and wonder perfectly.

While the game is short, it's designed to be played multiple times. Even though seeing every path and getting every achievement took me only 12 hours. It was a 12 hours well spent.

I grew up hearing the stories about how FF2 was the worst entry in the series my a long shot. Knowing that I tempered my expectations as I dove into the Pixel Remaster for the sake of trying it anyway. And maybe it was because I expected the game to be so bad that I ended up enjoying the game the way I did.

Gameplay:
The game is an experiment on removing the classic leveling system with a reactive stat bonus system that raises the stats you use, and for the most part it gets the job done. Your attacker gets more strength, your caster gets more intelligence and your healer gets more spirit, whoever you choose them to be and they all get more weapon experience based on what they have equipped.

Where it fails is in the magic system that also relies on you using a spell to level it up. This has the disadvantage of causing every spell you learn to start at rank 1. It's the end of the game and you just learned Flare. This would normally be a great boon, but instead as a rank 1 spell, it does minimal damage until you rank it up through use. Weapons/Armor also provide penalties to your magic damage that the game does not communicate to you about.

Story:
The game does a good job of sending you to every corner of the map as the story progresses with some entertaining developments, though it will constantly make you backtrack to the main town to report to the princess. This is good in that it helps you form a bond with her as a supporting character, but is bad in that the constant backtracking after every story moment is annoying, and even when you know where to go next, the plot will refuse to advance until you report your progress.

Overall, I think this game is worth playing as a novelty. Just to see how such a game once existed. Don't go in expecting a great game and you may just have a good time.

I enjoyed my time with this game. It had a lot of interesting ideas, though they don't all land, I appreciate the attempt at something new.

For characters, I found the main duo, dry and boring. They are both incredibly serious about their mission and it never feels like they are anything but avatars for the player rather than people. The supporting party you meet on the journey however are all a joy and greatly enhanced the journey.

For combat. I appreciated the mixup of using the Octopath lock breaking system as rather an interrupt for enemy spells/skills. I felt the system grew more complex appropriately as your party grew and forced you to think sometimes on how it was even possible to break them in the limited number of turns you were given, or if you will do something else to mitigate the damage you will receive.

As a downside to that though, the focus on breaking locks also left the number of skills and variety quite low. This meant that your cast for the most part plays exactly the same the moment you get them as they do at the end of the game, and this can get tiring.

As for the story, it was a fairly standard chosen one story with some interesting developments, but I felt it ultimately fell short, specially at the end.

I think overall it was a good first attempt at an RPG from Sabotage, and I look forward to what they try next, even if its a different genre again. I think this game is worth playing. It won't change your life, but it's a solid game.